"The Leftovers": Sometimes Brilliant, Sometimes Baffling. Always "Bleak", Always Peerless.

There is nothing like The Leftovers on television. It is uncompromising. There are few shows like it that are so doggedly interested in putting its viewer off, or quite so stubbornly devoted to telling its story on its own terms, for good and for ilk.

Television has gotten a little obsessed with dark programs, and The Leftovers makes some of the most disturbing series look pleasant. “Bleak” is the word most commonly used to describe the show. It is unrelenting in how miserable and hopeless its vision is. Where some shows might crack a joke at their own self-seriousness and portentousness, The Leftovers can be humorless to a fault. It bathes in how unpleasant and unforgiving its vision is. 

However, the show doesn’t revel in misery for its own sake. It beats its audience over the head with how achingly dissatisfying its world is and how numbingly empty the characters who inhabit it are. (It takes the sort of constant, unshakable unfulfillment and dissatisfaction of the characters of Mad Men and ramps it up to eleven). But it does this with a purpose.

The show’s premise starts from an intriguing concept that the show takes full advantage of: 2% of the world’s population inexplicably vanished on October 14^th, 2011   – and there’s no clear pattern to the sudden disappearances, some are innocent while others were awful people. It’s not enough people to destabilize the world but it is enough to be noticeable and impactful. As Maureen Ryan succinctly describes it, “life is the same, but it isn't”. Life has become both far more meaningful and simultaneously more meaningless. The show jumps ahead to three years later, as the remaining people of earth, the leftovers, try to understand what the event meant while putting their lives back together. Life in The Leftovers is kind of like ours, except everyone constantly, gnawingly hates existing.  

All the things we ask ourselves on a day-to-day basis -- What is the meaning of life? Is there a higher power? What does it mean to be a good person; is it even worth it?, etc. -- are still there but they feel ten times more pertinent. The rapture appears to have happened and yet life keeps going on, as mundane, boring and a little unpleasant as ever. At its core, the series is about living with grief and loss, and how we come to terms with it -- and also the ways we never fully do. 

Much of this grimness is, in fact, not very different from a lot of dark, violent content on television, but it is the context in which it is presented which makes it feel so desolate and morbid. It comes from what Phillip Maciak calls the “aesthetic of the ordinary”, or the show’s willingness to portray the ordinary, everyday, and mundane – to be plotless and aimless, and to capture the details of the day-to-day, of simply being and existing. “This is what seems to be frustrating. It’s not that the show is sad or that it’s brutal, it’s that we don’t have a propulsive plot that distracts us from that sadness or that brutality,” Maciak argues. The Leftovers lingers on it, dwells on it, and what it lingers on is emotional, not plot, turmoil: ennui, guilt, longing. The big moment has passed: it’s all aftermath, all the time.

The show centers on the Garvey family, an interesting choice, since they haven’t lost anyone. Yet the Garveys are, in some ways, even more broken and sad than a lot of people who have lost far more. The reasons for this aren’t immediately apparent and are part of the show’s ongoing mysteries. Kevin (Justin Theroux, initially a bit bland but slowly reveals a wonderful, manic desperation), the police chief of a small New York town called Mapleton, is trying to maintain order in his town, while also possibly losing his mind. He lives with his quiet, rebellious teen daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley, great in a role that could so easily have fallen into cliche), who provides a window into the way adolescence life and ritual functions in this new world. 

It’s quickly revealed that the remaining Garveys are disconnected in ways beyond the emotional. Tommy’s wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman, stunning in a largely wordless performance) has joined a nearby newly formed religious order/possible cult called the Guilty Remnant that formed in the wake of the Departure. Finally, son Tommy (Chris Zylka) has dropped out of college and lives on the compound of a cult messianic figure who claims he can hug away people’s suffering and has an unhealthy obsession with underage Asians. 

Mapleton acts as microcosm of the larger world, and co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrota (who’s book the show is based on) do an excellent job of building up this world, filling it out with all sorts of weird, distinctive details. The most notable example of this is the Guilty Remnant, which is possibly the show’s greatest, most fully realized creation. They take vows of silence, chain smoke, and wear all white, and their constant presence lingers over everything, as they stalk or hang around in judgment in order to amass more recruits. The Mapleton chapter is led by the menacing mother hen Patti (Ann Dowd, also fantastic in another primarily silent role). The Remnant are bizarre and sinister, but they’re not really the villains of the show, so much as one odd corner of this world trying to cope with their loss and faith in their own peculiar way (They take actions that mark them as dangerous, but they also offer up one of many, not entirely unreasonable, perspectives). 

The show’s focus extends beyond the Garveys and the Remant though. Indeed, the show’s two best episode are deep-digging character studies centered on the two Jamison siblings. The third episode centers on Matt (Christopher Eccleston), a local preacher, who finds his faith and beliefs put to the test. Meanwhile, the sixth episode deals with how Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), who lost her husband and two children on the day of the Departure, grapples with such overwhelming loss.

Trying to find comparisons for the series are somewhat futile. There are parallels, but they fall short. Lindelof’s most famous work, the television series Lost, has some overlap. Both have confounding ongoing mysteries at their center that never entirely get explained, and both play around with some narrative ambiguity that can be as frustrating as it can be riveting. The closest thing the two shows have in common is their interest in their characters above all other elements, and thankfully The Leftovers has a number of distinctive, well-acted characters. Otherwise, Lost is a far more inviting series, inclined to use genre elements and throw in a nice dose of levity to make the crazy go down easier. 

More accurate comparisons might be to the work of auteurs working in the medium. The show is distinguished by how uncompromising it is. It has the quality of Louie in its willingness to simply not give a shit about what anyone thinks or feels about its singular vision. If you can’t get on its particular wave-length, the show isn’t going to try to do anything to make you feel more at ease or at home. 

Perhaps an even better analogous example is David Lynch’s work on Twin Peaks, a show that was super bizarre and surreal, and that could care less about its central mystery. Instead, the show was concerned with the lack of answers to that mystery and the way it haunted and confounded the characters surrounding the mystery (This, of course, frustrated viewers and helped lead to the show’s cancellation – and it did lead to answers being given, but they were never as satisfying as hoped for. Sometimes a lack of answers is exactly what a show needs to thrive). Looking for and receiving answers is beside the point, a wild goose chase at best. 

The simple fact is that the show is not for everyone. The show significantly goes out of its way to alienate its audience, and even when it’s understandable why the show feels the needs to be so brutal and dark, it doesn’t make the experience of sitting through it any easier.

And yet, if you can get on its level, The Leftovers is exhilarating. It’s a series concerned with mood, tone and atmosphere, crafting an intense, singular experience. In its desire visually, tonally and narratively to push our discomfiture and unease, it has a lot in common with Hannibal. Like that series, it is also visually arresting, as well as equal parts pointed symbolism and dark, twisty narrative (For one thing, the show is essentially a giant parable with many installments acting as mini parables).

Sonia Soraiya, in her review of the pilot, compared the experience to trying to dissect a novel for a high school English class. Admittedly there is a certain self-importance to it that can be a little grating. The show winds and wends, twists and turns in on itself. It has a modernist novel quality, where it seems to have deeper significance, if only you’re willing to dig a little deeper and ask what it all means. (But at the end of the day, the meaning of the series is whatever we and the characters ascribe to the events taking place). 

The show doesn’t always work. Sometimes the strange structuring to the show – sometimes huge and sprawling, sometimes laser focused and penetrating -- feels like a gambit that hasn’t quite paid off yet – and may be never will. The structure also makes the series occasionally feel scattered and fragmented and like it hasn’t kicked into high gear yet (potentially problematic for a show with one episode left unaired in its first season). Episodes often don’t feel like a standard episode of television, beginning in one place, meandering all over, and then ending in an unexpected, not entirely understandable place. Some stories just aren’t compelling enough to warrant the attention they’ve been given, especially Tommy’s story -- which is too disconnected from the rest of the show. And then there's the basic frustration borne from its general opaqueness and strangeness.

Yet there is something overall to the show that is unshakable. It’s ambitious and reaching, and probably trying to do far more than it is really capable of. The series is like someone speaking in tongues. It doesn’t always make sense and perhaps it’s not as meaningful as it seems, but it’s also so fascinating and striking that it’s hard to resist.